WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
PREFACE
According to the author's original plan, the present pamphlet was intended for the purpose of developing in greater detail the ideas that were expressed in the article he wrote in Iskra, No. 4, May, 1901, entitled "Where to Begin."[1] First of all, we must apologise to the reader for this belated fulfilment of the promise made in that article (and repeated in reply to many private enquiries and letters). One of the reasons for this belatedness was the attempt to combine all the Social-Democratic organisations abroad which was undertaken in June last (1901). Naturally, one wanted to see the results of this attempt, for had it been successful, it would perhaps have been necessary to express Iskra's views on organisation from another point of view. In any case, such success promised to put an end very quickly to the existence of two separate tendencies in Russian Social-Democracy. As the reader knows, the attempt failed, and, as we shall try to show farther on, failure was inevitable after the new turn Rabocheye Dyelo took in its issue No. 10 towards Economism. It was found to be absolutely necessary to commence a determined fight against these diffused, ill-defined, but very persistent tendencies, which may degenerate into many diverse forms. Accordingly, the original plan of the pamphlet was changed and considerably enlarged.
Its main theme was to have been the three questions presented in the article: "Where to Begin," viz., the character and the principal content of our political agitation; our organisational tasks; and the plan for setting up simultaneously in various parts of the country, a militant, All-Russian organisation. These questions have long engaged the mind of the author, and he tried to raise them in the Rabocheye Gazeta at the time one of the unsuccessful attempts was made to revive that paper (cf. Chap. V). But the original plan to confine this pamphlet to these three questions, and to express our views as far as possible in a positive form without, or almost without, entering into polemics, proved quite impracticable for two
- ↑ See V. I. Lenin, The Iskra Period, Book I, p. 109.—Ed.
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